$23.00 AUD

Dark, sharp, blackly funny and powerful, this is memoir, wielded as weapon. Telling the story of a splintered family, a mother who is unlike any other, and her daughters who have no choice but to come to the rescue, The Erratics has the tightly compressed energy of an explosive device. This is quite sim
ply an outstanding piece of writing. We've been disowned and disinherited: there's not changing it, I say. When something bad happens to them, we'll know soon enough and we'll deal with it together. I don't realise it at the time, but when I say that, I imply I care. I imply there may be something to be salvaged. I misspeak. But I'm flying out anyway. Blood calls to blood; what can I tell you. This is a memoir about a dysfunctional family, about a mother and her daughters. But make no mistake. This is like no mother-daughter relationship you know. When Vicki Laveau-Harvie's elderly mother is hospitalised unexpectedly, Vicki and her sister travel to their parents' isolated ranch home in Alberta, Canada, to help their father. Estranged from their parents for many years, Vicki and her sister are horrified by what they discover on their arrival. For years, Vicki's mother has camouflaged her manic delusions and savage unpredictability, and over the decades she has managed to shut herself and her husband away from the outside world, systematically starving him and making him a virtual prisoner in his own home. Vicki and her sister have a lot to do, in very little time, to save their father. And at every step they have to contend with their mother, whose favourite phrase during their childhood was: 'I'll get you and you won't even know I'm doing it.' A ferocious, sharp, darkly funny and wholly compelling memoir of families, the pain they can inflict and the legacy they leave, The Erratics has the tightly coiled, compressed energy of an explosive device - it will take your breath away. Winner of the Finch Memoir Prize in 2018, and Winner of the Stella Awards in 2019....Show more

$33.00 AUD

Bret Easton Ellis has wrestled with the double-edged sword of fame and notoriety for more than thirty years now, since Less Than Zero catapulted him into the limelight in 1985, earning him devoted fans and, perhaps, even fiercer enemies.
An enigmatic figure who has always gone against the grain and ref
used categorization, he captured the depravity of the eighties with one of contemporary literature's most polarizing characters, American Psycho's iconic, terrifying Patrick Bateman, and received plentiful death threats in the bargain. In recent years, his candor and gallows humor on both Twitter and his podcast have continued his legacy as someone determined to speak the truth, however painful it might be, and whom people accordingly either love or love to hate. He encounters various positions and voices controversial opinions, more often than not fighting the status quo.
Now, in White, with the same originality displayed in his fiction, Ellis pours himself out onto the page and, in doing so, eviscerates the perceived good that the social-media age has wrought, starting with the dangerous cult of likeability. White is both a denunciation of censorship, particularly the self-inflicted sort committed in hopes of being 'accepted', and a bracing view of a life devoted to authenticity....Show more

$35.00 AUD

'For my first ten years I grew up in Lavender Bay with the smell of salt water, in houses facing the grey curved eye of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. There was a distant rumble, like thunder, when trains went across.' This is a lyrical and honest memoir of a poet's life in Sydney. From Lavender Bay to Lind
field, Geoff Lehmann tells the story of his life as a poet, tax lawyer, member of the Sydney Push, single father to three small children and finally, a happily married man who returns to poetry writing and translation. His life and work crosses with some of the leading cultural figures of the twentieth century and beyond - Les Murray, Judith Wright, Christopher Brennan, Clive James. He traces the contours of his own life and his family history, and the contours of particular slice of Sydney....Show more

$50.00 AUD

'Wonderfully exciting ... Sturgis's great achievement is to take on board his great flurry of contradictions' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday, 5* review.
Oscar Wilde's life - like his wit - was alive with paradox. He was both an early exponent and a victim of 'celebrity culture': famous for being famo
us, he was lauded and ridiculed in equal measure.
His achievements were frequently downplayed, his successes resented. He had a genius for comedy but strove to write tragedies. He was an unabashed snob who nevertheless delighted in exposing the faults of society. He affected a dandified disdain but was prone to great acts of kindness. Although happily married, he became a passionate lover of men and - at the very peak of his success - brought disaster upon himself. He disparaged authority, yet went to the law to defend his love for Lord Alfred Douglas.
Having delighted in fashionable throngs, Wilde died almost alone: barely a dozen people were at his graveside.
Yet despite this ruinous end, Wilde's star continues to shine brightly. His was a life of quite extraordinary drama. Above all, his flamboyant refusal to conform to the social and sexual orthodoxies of his day make him a hero and an inspiration to all who seek to challenge convention.
In the first major biography of Oscar Wilde in thirty years, Matthew Sturgis draws on a wealth of new material and fresh research to place the man firmly in the context of his times. He brings alive the distinctive mood and characters of the fin de siècle in the richest and most compelling portrait of Wilde to date....Show more

$35.00 AUD

"Life itself is in these pages: in this candid, poetic style there is storytelling of real quality" - LEILA SLIMANI, author of Lullaby A powerful and personal account of the devastating consequences of childhood rape: a valuable voice for the #MeToo conversation. Adélaïde Bon grew up in a we
althy neighborhood in Paris, a privileged child with a loving family, lots of friends and seemingly limitless opportunity lying ahead of her. But one sunny afternoon, when she was nine years old, a strange man followed her home and raped her in the stairwell of her building. She told her parents, they took her to the police, the fact of the crime was registered ... and then a veil was quietly drawn over that part of her childhood, and life was supposed to go on. Except, of course, it didn't. Throughout her adolescence and young adulthood, Adélaïde struggles with the aftermath of the horror of that afternoon in 1990. The lingering trauma pervades all aspects of her life: family education, friendships, relationships, even her ability to eat normally. And then one day, many years later, when she is married and has a small son, she receives a call from the police saying that they think they have finally caught the man who raped her, a man who has hidden in plain sight for decades, with many other victims ready to testify against him. The subsequent court case reveals Giovanni Costa, the stuff of nightmares and bogeymen, finally vanquished by the weight of dozens and dozens of emotional and horrifying testimonies from all the women whose lives and childhoods he stole....Show more

$50.00 AUD

Robert A. Caro, 'one of the great reporters of our time and probably the greatest biographer' (Sunday Times), is one of the most acclaimed writers of his generation, whose biographies are widely considered to be masterpieces.
In Working he offers a captivating account of his life as a writer, describin
g the sometimes staggering lengths to which he has gone in order to produce his books and offering priceless insights into the art and craft of non-fiction writing.
Anyone interested in investigative journalism and the pursuit of truth, in the writer's process and the creation of literature, in the art of interviewing or simply the psychology of excellence will find a masterclass in all these subjects within these pages. Readers already familiar with Caro's work, meanwhile, will be thrilled at the revelations on offer, including how he discovered the fiercely guarded secrets of his subjects, how he constructed the pivotal scenes in his books and the fullest description yet of his forthcoming final volume of The Years of Lyndon Johnson.
Including several of Caro's most famous speeches and interviews alongside the new material, Working is the self-portrait of a man who knows the meaning and importance of great story-telling. It is, like all his books, an utterly riveting example of that too....Show more

$35.00 AUD

A compilation of sketches, photographs, and letters, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to the stories by Lucia Berlin
Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical sketches called Welcome Home. The work consisted of more than twenty chapt
ers that started in 1936 in Alaska and ended (prematurely) in 1966 in southern Mexico. In our publication of Welcome Home, her son Jeff Berlin is filling in the gaps with photos and letters from her eventful, romantic, and tragic life.
From Alaska to Argentina, Kentucky to Mexico, New York City to Chile, Berlin's world was wide. And the writing here is, as we've come to expect, dazzling. She describes the places she lived and the people she knew with all the style and wit and heart and humor that readers fell in love with in her stories.
Combined with letters from and photos of friends and lovers, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to A Manual for Cleaning Women and Evening in Paradise....Show more

$23.00 AUD

When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up different worlds and cast new light on this one. She was whisked away to Narnia - and Kirrin Island - and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. No wonder she only
left the house for her weekly trip to the library.
In Bookworm, Lucy brings the favourite characters of our collective childhoods back to life and disinters a few forgotten treasures poignantly, wittily using them to tell her own story, that of a born, and unrepentant, bookworm....Show more

$39.95 AUD

Half the Perfect World is a social and literary account of the expatriate artist community on the Greek island of Hydra from 1955 to 1964, and is richly illustrated by LIFE Magazine eye-witness photographer James Burke. Fostered by celebrated Australian literary couple Charmian Clift and George Johnston
, this fabled 'colony' came to include renowned singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen and numerous other writers and artists, including many whose youthful ambitions were never realised. What brought this group to Hydra? What life did they live there? And what does their story reveal about the post-war world? Looking at the Hydra expatriates through their writing, letters, diaries and photographs, Genoni and Dalziell identify a deep restlessness within a rapidly changing time of emerging social movements and counter-cultures, travel, tourism and leisure, shifting geo-political realities, incipient pop-cultures, new technologies of communication and entertainment, and altered understandings of what it meant to live as an expatriate artist....Show more

$17.00 AUD

A revelatory narrative charting the lives and works of legendary authors Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism The world broke in two in 1922 or thereabouts, ' the American author Willa Cather once wrote. Yet for Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eli
ot, E. M. Forster and D. H. Lawrence, 1922 began with a frighteningly blank page. Eliot was in Switzerland recovering from a nervous breakdown. Forster was grappling with unrequited love. Woolf and Lawrence, meanwhile, were both in bed with the flu. Confronting illness, personal problems and the spectral ghost of World War I, all four felt literally at a loss for words. At the same time, with the publication of Joyce 's Ulysses and Proust 's In Search of Lost Time, the literary ground was shifting beneath their feet. As dismal as things seemed, 1922 turned out to be a year of outstanding creative renaissance for them all. By the end of the year Woolf had started Mrs Dalloway, Forster had returned to work on A Passage to India, Lawrence had written his heavily autobiographical novel Kangaroo, and Eliot had finished and published to great acclaim The Waste Land '. Each discovered their own private literary way to bridge their problems and the lost time of the war. In doing so, they changed the face of literature. Full of surprising insights and original research, Bill Goldstein 's The World Broke in Two chronicles the intertwined lives and works of these four writers in a crucial year of change....Show more

$25.00 AUD

"Stunning. A precise puncturing of the post-racial bubble." --Nafkote Tamirat For readers of Between the World and Me and We Should All Be Feminists, an intimate and profound meditation on the politics of race today, from prizewinning novelist David Chariandy. I can glimpse, through the lens of my own e
xperience, how a parent or grandparent, encouraged to remain silent and feel ashamed of themselves, may nevertheless find the strength to voice directly to a child a truer story of ancestry. When a moment of ignored-in-the-moment bigotry prompted his three-year-old daughter to ask, "What happened?" David Chariandy began wondering how to discuss with his children the politics of race. A decade later, in a newly heated era of both struggle and divisions, he writes a letter to his now thirteen-year-old daughter. The son of Black and South Asian migrants from Trinidad, David draws upon his personal and ancestral past, including the legacies of slavery, indenture, and immigration, as well as the experience of growing up as a visible minority in the land of his birth. In sharing with his daughter his own story, he hopes to help cultivate within her a sense of identity and responsibility that balances the painful truths of the past and present with hopeful possibilities for a better future....Show more

$20.00 AUD

Longlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction From the twice-Booker-shortlisted author comes a witty and audacious examination of writing and womanhood "Life falls apart. We try to get a grip. We try to hold it together. And then we realize that we don't want to hold
it together." Crystalline, witty and audacious, The Cost of Living addresses itself to the dual experiences of writing and of womanhood, examining what is essential in each. Following the acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, which reflected deeply on the nature of gender politics and a life in letters, The Cost of Living returns to the same subject and to the same life, to find a writer in radical flux. If a woman dismantles her life, expands it and puts it back together in a new shape, how might she describe this new composition? "Words have to open the mind. When words close the mind you can be sure that someone has been reduced to nothingness." In this elegiac second instalment of her "living autobiography", Deborah Levy considers what it means to live with value and meaning and pleasure. The Cost of Living is a vital and astonishing testimony, as distinctive, wide-ranging and original as Levy's acclaimed novels....Show more